“I shall stop calling baby ‘Baby’ now, mamma. She is going to be named after you—Esther. It is too grown up a name to call a little baby in common. And we can’t call her Hetty, because that is your pet name. Now what shall we call her for short?”
“Essy,” replied the young grandmother.
“Essy, then, it shall be. Mind, Mrs. Longman. Our baby is to the christened Esther, after mamma, and we are to call her Essy for short.”
“Very well, ma’am; it is a pretty name,” said the woman at the window.
“And we will have her christened on Sunday, mamma. We must wait for Sunday, because I remember papa’s preference for christening babies on Sunday, unless there should be some pressing necessity to perform the ceremony on a week day.”
“There’s grandpa!” exclaimed Elspeth to the baby, tapping on the window. And the next instant, the Rev. James Campbell—otherwise familiarly and affectionately in his own family called “Jimmy”—entered the house and walked into the room.
He kissed his daughter good-morning, and then took his stand on the rug, with his back to the fire, looking so grave that his wife grew anxious, but forbore to question him in the presence of their newly returned daughter.
“And perhaps, after all,” she reflected, “it is nothing very personal. He may have just returned from the deathbed of a parishioner. Such scenes always affect him, more for the sake of those left behind than for the departed, for he has too much faith to fret after the freed soul.”
While Mrs. Campbell was turning these thoughts over in her mind, and Mr. Campbell was standing in silence on the rug, Jennie finished her breakfast and arose and took her crowing baby from the arms of Elspeth, that the latter might clear off the table.
When this was done, and the woman had left the room, and Jennie had put her baby to sleep in the pretty berceaunette that had been provided by her mother that very morning, and the father, mother and daughter were seated around the fire, both these women with needlework in their hands, the curate said: